Mass Mind Control in China Enters a New Phase

WASHINGTON, D.C-Chinese censorship is evolving in new directions as the regime confronts the expansion of the Internet and cell phone users in China, and criticisms from the West. While the information controls are adapting, the objectives remain the same: the Chinese media and citizens are not allowed to broadcast or print any news that cast an unfavorable light on the Chinese communist regime.

The struggle for control has expanded to the Internet and the blogosphere as well as news reported from citizens with cell phones, and these new developments are a source of constant worry for the regime.

To assess the current restrictions on freedom of expression and access to information in the People's Republic of China, a Congressional hearing was held July 31 in Washington by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which invited China experts to testify.

"The most significant new phenomenon is the advent and explosion of citizen journalists inside China. Nothing may frighten the Chinese [regime] more than scores of citizens on the ground with cell phone cameras ready to capture and disseminate images from protests, demonstrations, and other events as they take place—and which can be quickly recorded by anyone and everyone," said Dan Southerland, speaking on behalf of Radio Free Asia.

Another change that makes the regime uncomfortable is the lifting of the requirement last January for foreign journalists to obtain approval prior to interviewing anyone. The regime could hardly expect foreign journalists to abide by such restrictions and cover the Olympic Games scheduled in August 2008. Some foreign journalists—by no means all—have had an easier time, but the relaxing of the rule did not help the domestic Chinese journalists. Indeed, they are not likely to experience any liberalization of the media prior to the 17th Party Congress this fall.

BROADCASTING INTO CHINA: Radio Free Asia's Vice President of Programming and Executive Editor, Dan Southerland, describes China's firewall at a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. on July 31. (Gary Feuerberg / The Epoch Times)

Less Freedom

Information and mind control has always been extreme since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949. Not just newspapers, periodicals and broadcasts, but the movie industry and art performances as well as school textbooks and teachers all have a duty to be the "mouthpiece" of the CCP, said Qinglian He, the author of the popular Pitfalls of Modernization and more recently, Media Control in China.

"Last year is the 40th anniversary of the Great Cultural Revolution and this year is the 50th anniversary of the Anti-rightists Campaign. Scholars in China are not allowed to organize any academic meetings to discuss these events. When some tried to come to the U.S. to attend conferences about the topics, they were warned or threatened by state security police," said Ms. He.

Prior to the late 1970s, the mass media consisted mainly of Communist Party mouthpieces, relying on state support. However, with the commercialization of mass media in recent decades, Chinese media have not experienced increased freedom to take on controversial political subjects as one might expect. In fact, commercialized newspapers in China today publish more propaganda than the Party mouthpieces, according to Ashley Esarey, who teaches political science at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Esarey conducted a study with other researchers of the contents in over 11,000 newspaper articles published in 10 newspapers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou from 1980-2003. The results were not encouraging. They found that criticism of powerful state institutions and government policy had decreased over time, opposing perspectives in news reports had dropped slightly, and frequency of regime propaganda had shown a considerable increase.

"Out of all of the reports analyzed in my study, not a single news story was identified that criticized a central government leader by name," said Esarey. China's leaders, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, and even members of the powerful Politburo are never criticized directly.

Discussions of the power struggles within the top leadership is taboo, said Southerland. Zhao Yan, a New York Times researcher in Beijing, was arrested for writing that Jiang Zemin would be resigning as head of China's military commission.

"No coverage is allowed of foreign countries' criticism of China's human rights problems or its sales of military technology overseas," said Southerland.

"…corruption is rarely covered unless it involves an official who has fallen from favor with the top leaders," added Southerland.

Guangzhou's Southern Metropolis Daily first broke the SARS story in early 2003, and embarrassed Guangzhou officials and police. The paper's two executives found themselves arrested for "embezzlement" and sentenced to terms of 11 and 13 years in prison, while the editor-in-chief was arrested and held in jail for five months, said Southerland.

New Opportunities on the Internet

"Without a doubt the most powerful force for increasing the free flow of information in China has been the explosion in internet use during the last decade," said Esarey. China is fast overtaking the U.S. in the number of internet users, he said.

The current internet population in China is about 137 million, according to Deborah Fallows of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which made use of semi-official data from the China Network Information Center. This number is rapidly catching up with the U.S. which leads the world with somewhere between 165 and 210 million. Seventy percent of the "netizens" in China are under 30, and they tend to be urban, male, and disproportionately students. Cell phone reach in the urban areas was 20% compared to just over 3% in the rural areas, writes Ms. Fallows.

The mobile phone growth is even more phenomenal, according to Xiao Qiang, Director, China Internet Project at the University of California (Berkeley). There are more than 440 million mobile phone users in China.

"Many of the exposes in recent years—including for example, the 2007 story about the enslavement of hundreds of workers in Shanxi brick kilns—first appeared on the Internet before being picked up by local Chinese media," said Esarey. So, the controversial material can get through the Internet even though the CCP will send orders to remove it.

From his analysis of China's blogosphere, Esarey found substantially higher levels of freedom and multiple perspectives there than the mass circulation daily newspapers. He also found that these blogs with social and economic content carry a much lower level of "regime propaganda."

"While the state regularly shuts down blogs containing politically sensitive contents, bloggers often operate multiple blogs and start new blogs, if one becomes unusable," said Esarey. Bloggers have been known to attack regime wrongdoing and misinformation in the media reports. "Due to concerns about personal safety, Chinese bloggers voice critiques of politics and society in indirect or vague language or even satire," said Esarey.

More Media Controls Coming

On January 23, 2007, China's communist leader, Hu Jintao, made a speech before the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, where he called for strengthening Internet controls. This means improving technologies, content controls and network security that monitor the Internet.

The political entities that are in charge of the Internet in China are:

• Central Propaganda Department—this highly secretive body ensures media follow the official line of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
• Ministry of Information Industry (MII) regulates telecommunications and software industries, and licenses all websites in the China. "...it is also responsible for the building up of surveillance and filtering technologies, known collectively as The Great Firewall," says Qiang.
• State Council Information Office (SCIO) oversees all websites that publish news which reaches down to the provincial and city levels, and is responsible for Internet content.
• The Ministry of Public Security, also under the State Council, is the enforcement agency that monitors online content and arrests violators.

  "Most websites are not allowed to act as independent news gathers, and may only reprint news that has been published by official media outlets," says Qiang. To publish news websites one must first obtain an "Internet news content service license" from the SCIO, which is granted very selectively, says Qiang.

  A change in the method of media control was mentioned by Esarey. In the past, the news media were sent faxes from the CCP's Central Propaganda department telling them which subject they should stress or avoid entirely, said Esarey. Now the directives are given to the media managers through phone conversations. The move is "designed to reduce the paper trail that could reveal the specifics of news stories the ruling party seeks to suppress," said Esarey.

  All Internet service providers (ISPs) are required to register with the MII. Lately, the MII has been experimenting with expanding the regulations to individual Internet users, but has met a lot a resistance to implementing real-name registration in nationwide blogging systems.

  The BBS's (Bulletin board systems) are very popular at the universities where tens of thousands of people can be online at the same time. Real name registration at university BBS's caused the usage of the Internet forums to fall drastically. "The forum of Wuhan University previously had up to 10,000 users online at peak times, but after the registration rules went into effect, the number dropped to about 1,000," said Qiang.